How to Think Like a Poet

An entertaining guide to history''s most influential and inspiring poets - from Homer and Sappho to Shakespeare and Frank O''Hara - and how they can teach us to better understand the world around us. How did the greatest poets in history make the world anew? And what can we learn from the magic, wisdom and humour of their poetry? From the genius of the Greeks and Romans through the love and metaphysics of the Middle Ages, through to the Beat Poets of San Francisco, this is the ultimate guide to the greatest writers of the human age.Through short, biographical portraits, poet and teacher Dai George provides an entertaining introduction to how to think like a poet, and how we can weave that thinking into our everyday lives. He addresses questions poets have grappled with: What is it to describe the world? How can we express love, grief, or friendship? How can we rise above the misery of the world and see the beauty in the everyday?This book paints vivid pictures of a global assortment of renowned poets throughout history: from Sappho, Juvenal and LiXu, to William Shakespeare and John Donne, to Frank O Hara, Pablo Neruda and Sylvia Plath. George also seeks to re-examine the canon, in which overwhelmingly Western, white and male poets have been held up as pillars of the art, and bring to light major figures from other important cultures and communities, including China, pre-colonial America and Japan.>

Préface
An entertaining guide to history's most influential and inspiring poets - from Homer and Sappho to Shakespeare and Frank O'Hara - and how they can teach us to better understand the world around us.

Auteur

Dai George is a poet, novelist, critic and academic. His first poetry collection, The Claims Office, was an Evening Standard book of the year and his second, titled Karaoke King, was published by Seren in June 2021. His first novel, The Counterplot, was published as an Audible Original in 2019, and he is currently working on his second. He is the former reviews editor of Poetry London and has taught poetry and creative writing for many years at various universities. He is currently Lecturer in Creative Arts and Humantieis at UCL. His poetry has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Poetry Review, Poetry Wales and Islands Are But Mountains: New Poetry from the United Kingdom. His criticism and non-fiction features in popular and academic forums including the Guardian, The White Review, and Cambridge Quarterly. Alongside Sarah Howe and Vidyan Ravinthiran, George was a founding editor of the online poetry journal Prac Crit, which drew a large global readership across its five-year lifespan.

Contenu

Introduction 1 How to Think Like Homer 2 How to Think Like Sappho 3 How to Think Like Li Bai 4 How to Think Like Jalal al-Din Rumi 5 How to Think Like Dante Alighieri 6 How to Think Like Geoffrey Chaucer 7 How to Think Like William Shakespeare 8 How to Think Like John Donne 9 How to Think Like John Milton 10 How to Think Like Matsuo Basho 11 How to Think Like William Wordsworth 12 How to Think Like Walt Whitman 13 How to Think Like Emily Dickinson 14 How to Think Like Rabindranath Tagore 15 How to Think Like T. S. Eliot 16 How to Think Like Langston Hughes 17 How to Think Like Pablo Neruda 18 How to Think Like Elizabeth Bishop 19 How to Think Like Aimé Césaire 20 How to Think Like Dylan Thomas 21 How to Think Like Frank O'Hara 22 How to Think Like Sylvia Plath 23 How to Think Like Audre Lorde 24 How to Think Like a Contemporary Poet Acknowledgements Permissions Index